The Southern Frontier ― Landscapes Inspired by Bartram's Travels

These stunning reproductions of more than sixty oil paintings by landscape artist Philip Juras offer a glimpse of the pre-European settlement southern wilderness as late eighteenth-century naturalist William Bartram would have experienced it during his famed travels through the region. Juras spent years researching Bartram and revisiting important sites the naturalist wrote about in his celebrated Travels. The paintings combine direct observation with historical, scientific, and natural history research to depict, and in some cases reimagine, landscapes as they appeared in the 1770s.

Juras’s work explores many of the important and imperiled ecosystems that remain in the South today. These little-known, remnant natural communities are further illuminated by essays placing them in the context of Bartram’s legacy and the American landscape movement. Here is a rare glimpse of the southern frontier before it was irrevocably altered by European settlement.